Dear Readers,

Perhaps you’ve discovered 400 million people are on Facebook and want to grow your business there.

Here is an MLM Warning for you trying to build your business on Facebook…

We’re running into some issues with people targeting our friends on Facebook.  We’re finding people who are targeting people they don’t realize are already distributors with us and the ONLY place they could have found this person was Facebook.  If they’re targeting people who are already distributors they are probably targeting lots of other people too.

We’re also running into people who want to sell supplementary systems and are using Facebook friends as a sort of genealogy list. They can lookup my friends and see many of them are involved in the same business.  They’re using this information to try and sell them additional products which I do not endorse and which our company in fact does not approve of.  Our company is sending cease and desist orders to this vendor yet they are targeting unsuspecting friends/team members who are my Facebook friends.

What can you do to prevent this.

One option is to hide your friends. Only show your mutual friends.  To do this go to your Facebook page and then find your list of all your friends.  There is a little pencil icon there. Click on that and then click on “change visibility settings”. This will allow you to set your friends to only be visible by friends, or only visible by YOU. This will prevent people who aren’t your friends from harvesting your friends list.

The other thing I personally am doing is I’m removing most of my “friends”.  I’m going to try and get it down to where it’s just close friends and family. Then I’m setting up a “Fan Page“.  People who want to follow me on Facebook can “like” my fan page. This will allow them to get updates from me and following my activities on Facebook.

You can see I have added my Facebook fan page to my sidebar of my blog.  You can see who my friends are and become a fan yourself.

You might be saying, but Ben people can still harvest your friends from your fan page. That is true and I’m trying to see if there is another alternative.

A few advantages of the fan page is that I am lowering my total number of friends. This will allow me to keepup with my close friends and family better.  Another advantage is that if someone tries to friend one of my fans they do NOT see me as a mutual friend.  Facebook Fan’s are not mutual friends.  That will help some of my friends to not friend someone.

Previously if I saw a mutual friend whom I trusted I’d friend someone without even thinking about it.  By cutting back on my friends I’ll truly be able to trust those “mutual connections”.

Does that make sense? Do you have some tips how I can better manage a lot of Facebook connections?  Do you have suggestions? I’d love to hear form you.  Leave a comment and let me know!

- Ben Fitts
(that is also a link to my Facebook fan page!)

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